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Twitter has slammed Google’s move to personalize search, saying it will be harder to find relevant information.

Internet search giant Google is now sorting through photos and posts from its social network Google+ in its quest to provide the best search results, it announced Tuesday.

The move – widely seen as a tactic to compete with Facebook’s social supremacy – was called a “bad day for the Internet” by Twitter’s lawyer Alex Macgillivray, who used to work for Google.

Those logged into Google’s social network (comScore pegged the number of users at about 65 million in December) will start to see more results based on what their friends have posted. Say, for example, a cat lover Googled ‘cute kitten.’ With personalized search, photos from their friends’ Google+ albums may turn up.

Twitter, the service many people turn to for real-time information, is afraid the new social search will bury the breaking news its 100 million users provide, said spokesman Matt Graves in a statement.

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“We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”

Whether this proves to be true, Google’s move has unquestionably heated up the battle between the social networking heavy weights.

“Google understands that ranking number one in the world for hardware flooring doesn’t matter – it really has to have a much more local context, friends’ comments or friends’ opinions,” said Tim Richardson, ecommerce professor at the University of Toronto.

Both Facebook and Twitter block Google from deeply sifting through and then storing the avalanche of personal content users upload, leaving the search engine in the dark when it comes to peoples’ thoughts on the latest episode of Mad Men or the new downtown restaurant. (Tweets do come up in searches, but Google cannot easily catalogue them.)

But people are more likely to use a service that comes with friends’ recommendations, Richardson said. Since social search gives advertisers another tool to win customers it’s likely around to stay, he said.

Google isn’t the first to take search social. Facebook has had a partnership with Microsoft’s search engine Bing since 2010. Last year, Bing started ranking sites based on if a person’s friends “like” it on Facebook.

But Bing only grabbed 14 per cent of the U.S. search traffic in November, whereas Google captured 65 per cent, according to comScore.

With more than 800 million users, Facebook is Google’s number one competitor for eyeballs and advertising revenues. Facebook’s knowledge of its users’ private details gives it an advantage when it comes to marketing.

Tailored search reflects the changing attitudes toward the web, said Gerald Penn, a computer science professor at the University of Toronto.

“The old way of looking at web search engines was that there’s content out there and you’re going to find it,” Penn said. “Now what people want to search for is other people.”

For those concerned about privacy, “Search, plus Your World,” as the new Google service is dubbed, can be turned off should users want to separate their networks and searches.

“That means no results from your friends, no private information and no personalization of results based on your Web history,” Google fellow Amit Singhal wrote on the company’s official blog.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is aware of Google’s foray into social search and will be paying attention to any privacy issues that might crop up, said spokesman Scott Hutchinson.

Users should review their privacy settings and make changes depending on their comfort level, Hutchinson added.

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